Over the last few years, people search has emerged as an important on-line search service. Unlike general searches where users are looking for information on a wide range of topics including people, products, news, events, etc., people search is about people. Hence, personal names are used predominantly as queries in people search. However, it is known that a significant percentage of queries in people search are misspelled.
Spelling errors in personal names are of a different nature compared to those in general text. Long before people search became widely popular, researchers working on the problem of personal name matching had recognized the human tendency to be inexact in recollecting names from the memory and specifying them. A study of personal names in hospital databases found that only 39% of the errors in the names were single typographical errors, whereas 80% of misspelled words in general text are due to single typographical errors. Further, multiple typographical errors, phonetic errors, cognitive errors and word substitutions are observed relatively more frequently in personal names compared to general text.
In addition to within-the-word errors, people search queries can be plagued by errors that are not usually seen in general text. For instance, one study discovered that 36% of the errors were due to addition or deletion of a word.